But maybe it's time. I end up sending out a lot of emails to friends about the stuff I find online, and while my intent was never to make this a mommy blog, it may be time to post some of the great stuff that I'm getting to re-visit now that junior is no longer a toddler. Books, games, crazy conversations that crack me up. Because really, that's where my focus is - on kid stuff, family stuff, food and health stuff. Ok, my focus is actually on keeping the chaos at bay, but when I'm not doing that, it's the above.

I've also been dragging my feet on the design work a little because I know what I want to do and need to just DO IT instead of whinging about this or that. It's time. Time to embrace the next step. So, you'll see me back here or you won't. Let's see how it goes.

We recently aquired a picnic table and a huge bbq. The bbq is on long-loan from a friend who is in London for awhile and the picnic table is just the end-all-be-all of craigslist awesomeness. The combined goodness means we're starting to ramp up for the season of eating outside. Granted, this is the Northwest, and it's 4th of July, so summer weather actually starts tomorrow.

I love the photo David took. I just had to put it somewhere.

backtoo = tattoo
hiccup truck = pickup truck
close looks = binoculars
moki = motorcycle
noms = generally peaches, occasionally applies to various other fruits
yoda = the mis-pronunciation of his best girlfriend's name.
noonoos = noodles

The kid is funny. He cracks me up every day. I'm sure I'm forgetting things.

This is a milestone. Almost more real than birthdays, and almost as emotional as when he decided to stop breastfeeding. I wanted to get rid of the crib. He could climb out, then with the side off and made into a toddler bed it was just "halfway" and I pushed for a twin bed. And so it went. Last night we took down the crib and in went a twin mattress and tonight we'll assemble the bedframe. The thing is, he's kind of excited about it all and we don't spend 15 minutes in the rocking chair snuggling. He wants to snuggle in bed. This was indeed part of my plan, however I'm not sure I am *actually* ready.

And, so, here I am. He's napping in his big boy bed. We recently marked 3 on the calendar and made another mark on the height wall. Milestones.

I'm so thankful every day. I'm pretty good about not forgetting to be thankful for everything when it comes to him. I have been reminded quite forcefully that life is precious, time goes by, and children are not automatically safe because your love for them has the force of a quasar.

But he's my baby. And he's growing.

we have aluminum siding. which i hate, but it was there when i bought the house and it's not the top priority for money right now (hello new furnace, you are just the amuse bouche).

on the white aluminum siding on the north side of the house it gets green. it's a slow process, but it has hit critical mass. it looks bad. it's embarrassing to have a house turning green.

bust out a LOT of baking soda, a mixing bowl you can carry around, a hospital glove (already on hand, not part of the budget) and a hose. make stiff paste, rub until your arm is about to disconnect. hose down. voila.

i love baking soda in so many ways. now there is +1. to be clear, i only did one section of the north side, but you could totally do the whole house and have pretty pristine siding. it doesn't take off super duper stains, but it does remove organic matter better than simple green or comet. they key is you have to let the wad of paste do the scrubbing. no brushes or sponges.

of course bonus points for not dumping chemicals into your yard.

if you're feeling ambitious, do the windows with vinegar and newspaper.

kindred souls, speak up about your baking soda love.

Let's look at some of my web doings - c. late 90's At the time I had just purchased my first (and only, so far) house, tended towards going to Paris a couple times a year, and had recently gone to Istanbul and Helsinki.

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Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.
-Charles Dickens

I ramble a lot about travel. Travel is life blood, but behind the willingness and psychic ability to travel is a very distinct sense of home. I could never take off on a whim, I don't think, unless there was something to return to. I suppose, if I didn't feel grounded, I would probably still take that trip but I wouldn't be back here writing about it. I would stay gone, probably looking for someplace which did fit the bill of 'home'. I suppose it's a bit Dorothy-like to get sentimental about it -- and generally I don't know if I would -- but I am on the verge of buying my first house and for me at least there is an incredible amount of fear (egad the prices!) and excitement. But it also makes you look pretty hard at what you need to feel that you have a home. I sat down with a real estate agent and had to do a pretty clear-cut list of priorities so she'd know what I wanted. What they don't tell you is that it sort of helps, but in the end, first time home buying is as much an emotional decision as any relationship.

And buying as a single person feels a little like bungee jumping. I don't have a ton of money, I am just taking what I have and seeing where it will take me. And it's certainly not into the huge loft space overlooking my 5 acres. It's a tiny house in an older neighborhood. I hope that one day I will be able to spend some years in France, maybe in the hills near where Chagall lived and created his masterpiece windows and where Matisse designed one of the most lovely churches I have ever seen. But very likely I will visit those places and not live there.

The latest issue of Architectural Digest has some really great retrospective sections. There are pages of quotes from writers on their sense of home with some ranging into their sense of self/being. It's really not as pretentious as it sounds. There are also some charming pictures of artists. The photos of Calder, Chagall, and Frankenthaler are my favorites. They are photos which are so charming, and have a nice sense of person and place about them. Art and books are good company, and while they don't rub your back, or go to movies with you, there is a certain sense of continuity that they provide which I enjoy.

And I think what makes home an actively good entity for me is my friends and animals. Having people sit around the kitchen, or reading with cats on my lap watching the fish swim is pretty ideal.

One of the biggest surprises about travel for me is that it is possible to find home, small pieces of it, elsewhere. Not everywhere, but there are places. I didn't find home in London, but certainly in the south of France, in a small country bed and breakfast the room was home. The furniture was sparse but solid, the bed was like my grandmother's, the linens were linen, and tucked away in that place, there was no need to be anywhere else in the world. There was something similar in Istanbul. Even in the heat of the summer in a very different world from the one I am used to, after meeting up with friends (and after traveling halfway around the world alone) and sitting on the balcony drinking warm beer and looking out at the Bosphorus, it was home. The feeling extended into even the weirdest parts of that trip. As sappy as it sounds, as long as you are living in the moment, home can travel with you to some extent.

"I think maybe the dream house idea was the last unrealistic fantasy I gave up. The dream career, the dream husband, the dream children, all turned out to be specifically themselves, often wonderful, sometimes maddening, always real. No dream I ever had when I was young of my future family was nearly as interesting as they have turned out to be. Now here I live where I've ended up, down in the valley rather than up on the mountaintop, on three acres rather than thirty, surrounded by furniture rather than "pieces", listening to the forced air blow through the pipes rather than feeling the radiance shine up through my feet. One dog is sacked out on the carpet, the other is coming in through the sliding door from the deck. It's Sunday, and things could be a lot tidier around here. I know that when I get up and go into the kitchen, teens foraging for breakfast will have left every cabinet door open. All of this is thoroughly real and thoroughly OK. The fact is that the house where these moments come together is the best dream of all, the one you never knew you were going to have.
-- Jane Smiley from Dream House

As for yesterday - about 400 pounds of magazines removed from the studio. Progress! And the toolroom has been clean for a whole week. It's rad.

I'm thinking about painting the studio. I worked VERY hard to get it squared away originally - it was one of those epic projects which took about a year and should have taken a weekend. The walls are sort of a tuscan yellow and the floor is red. I can certainly live with it, but I'm just feeling a need for different colors. The floor is sealed on top of the red, so it might be funky to paint it, but...ultimately doesn't matter because it's old linoleum underneath, so one day I can just peel it all up. hmm. Anyway.

Oh, and the laundry room is picked up a bit too. So swell.

Or knit, or read, or make lamps, bake or do a little fall gardening. Sometimes it's easier to have a stolen 20 minutes sometimes than wide-open time. I also now have to update the resume and portfolio - a task which I HATE to do. I'd rather just work.

So, everything is fine, marching along. We have done two camping (car camping) trips with little man, the list of words is growing every day, very little illness, etc.

Is anyone out there? What are you doing as the autumn moves in?

i have had significant feelings of loss for my 20-something self. perhaps i am starting a mid-life crisis.

and yet, here we are, with no way to turn back, only to go forward.

i am thinking i will return to the blog or it will be packaged up with ribbons and put away. not clear on which yet.

I'm here! I'm here!

I suspect I'll have a long-winded post soon enough. The small person has a speech eval tomorrow. We'll see how that plays out. I hesitate to talk about it here, but mostly I hesitate on a lot here. Public and private does tend to shift as the family changes.

But I'm here! I'm here!

generally, I'm a don't.

i've blocked exactly one pair of socks on my fancy sock blockers.

I've never blocked another thing in my life. nope. i just knit. generally, if it needs to be blocked i don't knit it. well, you know, generally.

BUT NOW, now I'm blocking something. I really need it to be bigger, but it's also lace. Kinda for reals. And it is lovely yarn (STR lightweight, covelite colorway). I should be taking pics but I'm just too lazy and Top Gear is on.

It could be pretty fantastic.

ravelry link.

The house is always a mess, not enough storage, and I live with other people. Granted, we've just embraced laundry piles as a way of life. Just have to keep track of clean and not clean.

There's part of the kitchen celing that needs to be repaired from old water damage. Fortunately at least the roof part is taken care of. No good reason other than we don't have a reliable contractor.

The car needs to go in for scheduled maintenance. Long story, I'm putting it off and it doesn't seem to magically take care of itself.

I chipped my tooth, I can't figure out what to do about a dentist. Go back to the old one who I don't like but is now covered as a preferred dentist (wasn't when I left, and I wasn't going to go to someone I didn't like AND pay extra). PLUS I haven't had my teeth cleaned in awhile. So not me. But there it is. Should find a new one, have some recommendations, but simply have not had any more time to devote to dentist reviews. Jeebus.

Clothes shopping. That should be self-explanatory.

Laundry, aside from the above, I can't run the laundry while monkeybaby sleeps, it's in the basement directly under his crib. I want him to sleep more than I want clean underwear. And that is just how it plays out.

My back is a mess again. Should get cortisone shots. Uh huh, in my spare time.

Sleep. I stay up too late just so I have time to string 3 thoughts together. By myself. In my head.

Walking the dog. Poor guy needs WAYYYY more exercise. I've got so little left for that.

If monkeybaby is awake, he requires my attention. If he's not, I have to be working. Or cooking the second dinner for grownups, or if it's late enough, I have to think my three thoughts.

There are piles of crap everywhere in this house all the time. Ok, not literally. Although there are small rooms that need cleaning. Plus the yard, plus 600 house projects.

It is absolutely irrelevant to make lists if nothing ever happens. And we're in the stage that if I want to leave the house it's roughly a 90 minute extraction if everything goes perfectly.

thank god for amazon fresh, otherwise we'd probably starve.

awesome.

i think what it boils down to is that after working since i was 15, taking some time off to be a mom, and just kind of being home is pretty great. it does however push all my nesting buttons all the time. most of the time all i want to do is bake and garden and knit and take walks with the small person. the reality is that i have to work while he sleeps and then some, and in the evenings i'm pretty exhausted.

still.

all this sun makes me want to work in the yard and get it cleaned up and ready for spring. a new cast iron pan came in the mail yesterday so i'm itching to make something that requires a cocotte-ish type vessel. braised lamb shanks are speaking to me.

i do wish the two year old would eat more variety so i wasn't cooking two dinners every night.

i could read food and design blogs all day to boot. and there are little chickadees that come in a procession all day to the window birdfeeder.

time goes past, i'm not out in the "real world" too much. and while i do feel like some parts of my life are now gone forever, i do like this peaceful place. i'm going to try to enjoy it while i can, soon enough the small person will be in preschool and then school proper and i'll be back to working out there. for now the days slip by with few markers, it's beautiful out and it's all just fine.

while reading various foodie blogs, this came to mind. i write it down to remember when the name of the restaurant leaves my head again.

i look forward to one day taking monkeybaby to london before his best friend E. moves back. and attached to that (with any luck) a rousing jaunt to paris. one day. when the economy doesn't suck, etc.

now i just have to remember where that super weird park is with the fakey grotto. that was really odd.